The John Birch Society (JBS) is an extreme right-wing organisation[2] founded by candy manufacturer Robert W. Welch, Jr. in 1958 as a wingnutred-baitingpropaganda machine last line of defense against the massively ongoing, clandestine Communist takeover of the United States. An early book by Welch, The Politician, became controversial after it became widely known that an early manuscript included the accusation that President Dwight Eisenhower was a "conscious, dedicated agent of the Communist conspiracy." Just in case you wondered exactly how ridiculously out-there the JBS is.

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The John Birch Society took its name from a missionary named John Morrison Birch. According to the society, Birch, a missionary in China who joined the United States military during World War II, became the first victim of the Cold War. Despite having helped the Chinese by fighting the Japanese there, after the war he was supposedly killed by the commies[4] (25 August 1945), but the US government kept it quiet until one Robert Welch discovered the truth and exploited the poor son-of-a-Birch's name for his own political agenda.

“”The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.

In its early days the JBS was a somewhat respected institution. However, things soon moved in a more conspiracist and radical direction. For example the JBS at one point claimed that then President Eisenhower was an "agent of the Communist conspiracy" (simply for talking to the Soviet Union as opposed to starting World War III). Welch expounded on this theory bullshit at book length in The Politician.[6] "Birchers", as they were known, wrote a lot of letters during their early years on various scare issues, such as opposition to summits between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and keeping fluoride out of the water supply, from which it could enter our precious bodily fluids and corrupt our purity of essence. The Birchers were frequent promoters of moral panics on everything from the Panama Canal treaties to the nuclear disarmament movement, all claimed to be part of the Communist movement to undermine American security, and shared cross-membership and tactics with early Religious Right groups like Billy James Hargis's "Christian Crusade."

The JBS was not only anti-Communist, but critical of government in general as well, and claimed that America was the greatest in 1900:

“”There was still plenty of poverty in many areas, of course. But, it was a healthy kind of poverty, where every man took for granted that relief from dire want was entirely his own problem and responsibility. And, even the poverty was thus offset by the enormous blessing of freedom.

—John Birch Society Bulletin, July 1976.

Their tactics quickly alienated the mainstream American conservatives; years later, William F. Buckley, Jr. wrote an article on how he, Barry Goldwater, Russell Kirk, and a bunch of PR people did some very delicate maneuvering so that the Goldwater campaign could denounce the John Birch Society without losing the votes of the society's members, with Goldwater eventually stating that "We cannot allow the emblem of irresponsibility to attach to the conservative banner."[7] Nevertheless, they were out campaigning on Goldwater's behalf; during the 1964 campaign, Birchers mastered the tactic of mass distribution of cheap paperbacks, and three in particular: None Dare Call It Treason by John Stormer, A Texan Looks At Lyndon by J. Evetts Haley, and A Choice, Not An Echo by Phyllis Schlafly. You can find multiple copies of all three at your local thrift store, most of them still unread.

The Birchers' favored term for the "conspiracy" was the New World Order. Not surprisingly, their rapidly falling membership in the 1970s and 1980s turned around after 1990 when George H.W. Bush in an act of ill-advised stupidity used that very phrase in a speech. This gave the Birchers a new lease on life during the 1990s. After the New World Order conspiracy theories took outlandish and bizarre directions during the 1990s ranging from tales of black helicopters to shape-shifting reptilians, the Birchers staked out a position of relative moderation among the lunatic fringe and warned against acceptance of these more outlandish theories while promoting the New World Order theory as laid out in Gary Allen's 1972 book as being a liberal-secularist conspiracy led by the Rockefellers and other high financiers to bring about a socialist world government… again.

Arguably the Society's greatest claim to fame came in 1983, when Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was shot down by a Soviet interceptor after straying into Soviet airspace. The flight was carrying Georgia Congressional Representative Larry McDonald, who also happened to be the Society's second president. It being one of several incidents that nearly started WWIII, the fact that it didn't was taken by JBS's New American magazine as proof of the extent of Communist power over the US government. This really said more for Ronald Reagan keeping a cool head, and now that Reagan has been anointed a saint by the American Right for single-handedly destroying the Soviet Union, the whole affair never gets mentioned any more.

The society has been linked to 1988’s failed California Proposition 102, which required anyone who tested positive for HIV to be reported to the government and their sexual contacts investigated. It also would have erased laws against compulsory testing.[16]

Recently, they have morphed into aligned themselves with the Tea Party movement, and they are even co-sponsoring the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC),[17] the largest conservative conference in the US (this probably says more about modern conservatism in the US than it does about the JBS). They have a web site where they push every right-wing conspiracy theory you can think of while trying to pass themselves off as small government conservatives, though they quickly give themselves away as fairly authoritarian.[18]

They run a website, jbs.org, which includes links to their major projects "Stop a Con-Con" (opposed to a constitutional convention), leave NAFTA, leave United Nations, and to stop the chimericNorth American Union.[19] Their magazine, The New American, continues and they are also affiliated with FreedomProject, which pursues a similar agenda while opposing abortion and selling mugs.[20] As well as the idea that global warming is a liberal media conspiracy,[21] they also promote more esoteric conspiracy theories, such as that Karl Marx was only a front for a secret organisation, The League of the Just.[22] Some things never change...

In 1961, the Chad Mitchell Trio, one of many folk groups of the era, recorded the novelty track The John Birch Society Song which lampooned the organization.

In 1962, Bob Dylan did likewise with Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues.

Cartoonist Walt Kelly created "The Jack Acid Society" in several story arcs in his comic strip Pogo. The strips were collected, along with some original pieces, and published in 1962 as The Jack Acid Society Black Book.

The 1971 film Cold Turkey has a scene where members of the "Christopher Mott Society" are listening to a phonographic record of a speech by a right-wing pundit.

Paul Simon's solo version of "A Simple Desultory Philippic" includes the line "I've been John Birched, been stopped and searched."

"What's Wrong With Civil Rights", newspaper article alleging that the civil rights movement was created by the commies in order to create a Negro Soviet Republic.[23] See also "Anarchy USA", a similar 1hr15mins+ Cold War propaganda film produced by the Society against Civil Rights.